Effective meeting rooms are king in a hybrid work world

Sebastien Baillot

July 20, 2022

Rainbow Office Rooms enables efficient, quick set-up, easy administration video conferencing for today’s hybrid environments.

The world of work has been forced to adopt new ways of working. Remote communications and collaboration have taken a front seat to the old days of conducting strictly in-office meetings. As businesses negotiate a new hybrid dynamic, reliance on the tools that enable remote work have become critical for survival and for success. In particular, the quality of remote communications is essential for information exchange and productive work.

What it all means ― in practical terms

We’re about to find out what the new work era really means for businesses, employees, IT teams and end users. The ‘return to the office’ will be experienced in very different ways, depending on the employee and the tools put in place by their companies.

Today, many of us are experimenting with a hybrid work mode, combining work at home with a return to the office. And when we go to the office, a few days a week, it’s certainly not to sit alone behind a computer, working remotely with our colleagues who are at their homes. In this changing environment, meeting rooms are taking on a new important role.

Meetings are no longer either in-person or virtual, they’re now both. And while meeting dynamics may seem to be a granular focus, given the number that take place in the average business, and the role they play in facilitating effective collaboration, it’s crucial for companies to get the dynamics right.

The in-office meeting room setup is a crucial element, and there are two major technical considerations to address. Firstly, meeting rooms must be equipped with audio (and ideally video) systems, to enable collaboration with remote participants. Secondly, video conferencing rooms must be integrated into the company's communications system to offer an effective user experience.

Three things to consider

As companies traverse the deployment of modern communications systems, following are a few things to think about when choosing a video conferencing system.

1. Speed of implementation: The video conferencing system must be easy to install and must be integrated with your internal communications system to be truly effective. The cost and interoperability of the equipment (screen, speakers, microphone, cameras and more) must also be considered in the implementation process.

2. Efficiency: It’s important to be able to join or start your meeting in a few clicks, without having to connect different equipment, look for the right connector or launch an application. The meeting should also be reachable from a mobile phone or a computer without any special requirements, so that all participants can be easily integrated on-site or remotely from any device.

The functions available during meetings should also be considered, including integrated messaging, screen sharing and video recording, among others. All these features will provide a smooth user experience, identical regardless of the user profile, and ensure an efficient meeting.

3. Administration features: Don’t neglect this aspect. It’s essential to have tools that allow you to monitor the quality of meetings and identify any problems that may arise.

Meeting expectations

Rainbow Office Rooms complements Rainbow Office powered by RingCentral providing all the features your business needs to conduct hybrid collaboration and video conferencing. Based on Rainbow Office's advanced video capabilities, employees, partners and customers can collaborate seamlessly, no matter where they are.

When participants arrive at the video conferencing room, everything is ready to go. The equipment is pre-configured so you can activate a meeting simply from the control interface in the room.

You can schedule meetings using Microsoft® and Google Сalendar integrations, and switch from a video meeting on your mobile device to a video conference using Rooms. This is a useful feature if you have started a meeting alone or in a mobile situation and want to continue with several people in a room.

Once in a meeting, the various settings and equipment (microphones, cameras, or other) are controlled from the Rooms controller application, including:

● Changing view layout

● Assigning moderators

● Enabling/disabling the camera

● Changing speaker volume

● Logging out of Rooms

● Managing your microphone

● Managing participants

There’s no need to invest in expensive proprietary hardware because Rainbow Office Rooms works with standard equipment. If you already have a video conferencing terminal that supports the SIP protocol, you can integrate it into the solution using the Room Connector option.

Finally, the management interface is a key Rainbow Office Rooms feature. Administrators can use the administration portal to activate a room in a matter of minutes and integrate it into the company's calendar system. They can also get an at-a-glance overview of the status of all rooms across all locations (as well as the devices in those rooms) with the ability to easily identify, analyse and resolve any breakdowns or meeting quality issues.

Our workplaces are changing as we interact more and more. The boundaries between work, home and co-working spaces has been reduced considerably, and this porosity is reflected in the increased need for video conferencing. Gone are the days of proprietary equipment that only work with each other. Open, scalable, high-performance solutions have become a must. Rainbow Office Rooms addresses these new needs and enables your company to dynamically bring together virtual and geographically dispersed teams at a lower cost.